Whilst working as the acting Head of Immersive at the National Film & Television School (NFTS), I was part of the team that kicked off the StoryFutures Academy programme in late 2018, setting up the National Centre for Immersive Storytelling.

It’s great to see the final report for the programme contains lots of positive news about the impact achieved over five years.

You can download the report here: https://www.storyfutures.com/resources/storyfutures-academy-final-report

My focus was mainly on delivering a series of labs at NFTS designed to introduce storytellers to the joys and perils of immersive, allowing them to experience dozens of cutting-edge VR, AR and Mixed Reality titles and to experiment with the latest immersive production tools & technologies.

We also put in place a programme of funding for creating new original works, sometimes as prototypes and sometimes as fully-fledged co-productions.

I was only in post for the first 6 or 7 months of the programme’s existence – although I continued to contribute to the programme on the labs side of things for a couple of years. So I can’t claim a lot of credit for the impressive numbers quoted in the report.

However, it’s pleasing to see that over 1100 industry professionals benefited from the training and awareness process we put in place. That cohort included directors, producers, writers, designers, animators, artists drawn from a very wide range of backgrounds.

And many of the people who went to a lab ended up being involved in an original immersive production in some way, with over 50 co-productions delivered through the StoryFutures Academy programme and more than 500 jobs created or saved in the industry.

“At the outset of StoryFutures Academy we ambitiously
pitched an engagement of over 1,000 beneficiaries,
and to create and support 80 jobs; in the end we have
exceeded these expectations by ten-fold. We have
achieved nearly four times the financial co-investment
we targeted to leverage, achieving £11.5m against an
original KPI of £3.1m. We have supported nearly five
times the number of productions planned (50 from
an original KPI of 12) and doubled the number of
skills programmes we hoped to launch (101 against
a target of 49). Throughout all these achievements
we have embedded diversity in our work, with 24%
of participants from global majority backgrounds,
over 60% identifying as female and over 40% of our
activities benefitting participants and companies
outside London and the South East.”

All in all it’s a good news story, and I’m proud to have played my part in it.